India-Australia Test: Indian pacers are big losers

It has been a long and tiring journey for the Indian cricket team Down Under with a hard-fought draw in the Sydney Test on Saturday a just result for the brave batting efforts from Ajinkya Rahane and Bhuvneshwar Kumar.

There were twists and turns on the final day as well, but to end the series with a 0-2 loss instead of a 0-4 scoreline is not that bad, at least on paper. Before the series, a lot of emotion was spent off the field after Phil Hughes was felled by a Sean Abbott bouncer and eventually succumbed.

But once the Test series began after a few days’ delay, the Aussies played as hard as they are known for.

Prior to the Indian team’s departure, there seemed to be more concerns over batting than bowling. After getting whipped in England, the Indian batsmen were the butt of ridicule, with Virat Kohli singled out for special criticism.

Now that the series is over and Kohli is the man in command, he can pat himself on the back for how well he batted Down Under.

To score four centuries in a series, in which Kohli started as stand-in captain and then Dhoni led in the next two before handing the reins over permanently, was forceful.

Kohli is now the man in command, and that showed in the way he scored his fourth century and also how the team batted on the last day in Sydney.

Kohli's effective and daring batting apart, the performances of opener Murali Vijay and newcomer KL Rahul are huge positives, but the real villains have been the Indian fast bowlers.

If you see the bowling averages of the two teams, there is a story in itself. The Aussies bowled intelligently and effectively while the Indian pacemen were bereft of ideas.

Some of the short-pitched stuff hurled by the Indian quickies was laughable. It could have been a case of a bowler hurting his own toe — that’s how short they pitched!

Fast bowling is as much an art as a science and maybe the Indian bowlers can pick up the book Dennis Lillee wrote in the early eighties —The Art of Fast Bowling.

It’s not as if Ishant Sharma is a rookie with no experience of Test cricket. Usually, by the time the series comes to an end, Ishant’s fitness crumbles. He did not play the last Test but, rest assured, he did nothing to distinguish himself as the leader of the attack.

It is nice to bowl at over 140 kilometres per hour. But if Ishant, Varun Aaron, Umesh Yadav and Mohammed Shami thought they were going to take wickets with this kind of aimless bowling, they now know how wrong they were.

Pace can get you wickets only when you are using your brain at the same time. Perhaps, the worst tactic the Indian fast bowlers used in the series was to attempt the short-pitched stuff against Mitchell Johnson in the Brisbane Test, which backfired badly.

A fast bowler needs more than average intelligence to be a wicket-taker in Test cricket. Apart from pace, you have to plan to get a batsman out, which is what Kohli mentioned at the press conference on Saturday when he said “you have to set-up the batsman”.

Now that Kohli is in command in Test cricket, I am sure he will have a few things to tell the fast bowlers. But what is appalling is that the support staff attached to the Indian team seems to be providing zero inputs.

Yes, Ishant, Varun, Umesh and Shami can bowl really fast, but there has to be a strategy in place. History shows that India’s bowling coaches have largely failed in their job, and the same goes for Bharat Arun.

At some point, he needed to tell the bowlers this was not some speed gun contest, but what was required was consistency.

A good bowling coach is essential for Indian cricket, especially when the team is playing Tests away from home. Bowling at a fast click will be of no use unless there is some imagination about where to pitch the delivery and how to psych the batsman out.

If one compares the bowling averages of India and Australia, there are many pointers. But what’s also of importance is how Aussie spinner Nathan Lyon caught the eye with a 23-wicket haul in the series.

R Ashwin did as well as he could, but to have played Karn Sharma alone in the first Test made no sense. The focus will now shift to India’s performance in the ODI series and the ICC World Cup. But if one is concerned about the future of Indian Test cricket, the fast bowlers need serious tutoring.

Who needs to be entrusted with this job should be top priority for skipper Kohli and director of cricket operations Ravi Shastri.